The Webb is the successor to the now 20-year-old Hubble telescope, but it is much more than a simple replacement. The Webb telescope is so powerful it can detect just the barest wisps of light that have been traveling through space for nearly 13 billion years from, relatively speaking, moments after the Big Bang, the explosion that created the universe.

"We only have one chance to get it right," said Delaney Burkhart, mechanical integration specialist, steward and member of Local 1501's executive board. "Our job is to test, and retest and test again until we are confident that one is all we need."

Members of Local 1501 maintained and ran the 12,500 square-foot, nine-story clean room that was home to the Webb and its components and kept it 1,000 times cleaner than an operating room.

Paula Cain and her colleagues in the "blanket shop" handcrafted the multilayered thermal insulation that will protect the parts of the telescope that must stay (relatively) warm from the extremes of space and they will isolate the equipment that must stay extremely cold, safe from the heat of the telescope itself.

Marc Sansebastian designed and built the cooling system's hundreds of small parts, from the gold-plated clamps the size of grains of rice to the cat's cradle suspension system built from wisps of Kevlar thread thinner than a hair.

And after trying to rattle everything to pieces, they carefully put everything together so, when the time came, the $10 billion telescope could confidently be sent far beyond where any repair mission could reach it.

"Its purpose is to address the deepest questions we have: Where did we come from? Are we alone?" said Amber Straughn, deputy project scientist at Goddard.